I wrote about this recently. If we adopt SAS at the cost of OSS, its gonna make it even more harder to fight against corps which are against users and communities. We need to rally for OSS more than ever IMO.
O'saasy License Agreement
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Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#12I think that open source licenses for complete software (such as SaaS components) for commercial entities have a one major purpose: A marketing tactic. If I am open, it is easy to discuss it everywhere without paying for it. I think that if you are short on cash, open source is the way to go to get adoption faster. If you have endless money, then there is really no reason to open source it (except edge cases, like sh…
Yes obviously big tech knows how to profit from open source
they (AWS) profitted so hard from redis and elasticsearch that they had to literally change their licenses similar to O'sassy's
and even then people forked redis to create valkey and AWS engineers started working on it
Both redis and elasticsearch got so much backlash because "not open source" when in reality, they were trying to make ends meet but also since it allowed external contributions, people who contributed felt rug pulled
In the end, both of these had to revert switching to AGPL licenses.
Technically I am sure that people are still competing against these servers even with AGPL because it does have freedom 0 but I think that they kind of realized that backlash was very high
My opinion on the matter personally is, I value source code because I can work around it, I can see the code and audit it/ have a peace of mind.
But even now, open source is severely underfunded and I think we should do something about it. We cant really expect developers to write code in any license that you want, its their code and their wish (originally) and I think these are just means where someone wants to open source but he also wants to profit from his creation just enough so that he/she can maybe work full time on it/have more employees working on it and just have it grow better which for the end users does feel better.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#13I think that open source licenses for complete software (such as SaaS components) for commercial entities have a one major purpose: A marketing tactic. If I am open, it is easy to discuss it everywhere without paying for it. I think that if you are short on cash, open source is the way to go to get adoption faster. If you have endless money, then there is really no reason to open source it (except edge cases, like sh…
To be fair, when people worry about "stealing" their FOSS work, they don't mean someone forking their project, they mean someone outcompeting them on offering commercial infrastructure for their own project, typically launching a competing SaaS service. Of course, this is explicitly permitted and even encouraged by FOSS licenses, so calling it "stealing" is quite absurd. But it is also a real problem for a company tr…
> Essentially, it's pretty clear that you can't make a successful company out of selling free software
If that is so the case, what about source available licenses similar to O'saasy.
Do they work?
Because personally, although I love foss, its a compromise and I am willing to make it for some of my projects if it means that I can get enough funding to work on it full time basically.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#14People want to call their software open source, because it attracts customers. They don’t believe in software freedoms or open source, otherwise they’d never try or want to restrict Freedom 0. If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.
> If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part No the problem is that it cant compete on the hardware part sometimes Lets face it even if it something is open source, chances are that the most contributions/time are still spent by the person making it or the saas provider in this industry. Imagine that someone goes ahead and launches a cheaper version of their saas and people go use that, since that person isnt hav…
Okay, I've imagined that. Am I supposed to sympathise with the end users in this scenario or?..
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#15I used the MIT license for https://github.com/SaynaAI/sayna mainly because the challenge is usually in product velocity and direct sales/distribution. Blocking from SaaS is explicitly entirely redundant.
Making software is getting cheaper, so this kind of license would not protect against someone reverse-engineering the SaaS tool in a week. It is better to be abstracted away from those type of things IMHO
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#16It is not open source, it is not free. It’s a term tacked on to the MIT license. It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image? Steer clear unless you want to open yourself up to the copyright owners opinion changing. (See for example the pine email client and the…
> It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image? This strikes me as somewhat contrived. Like yeah, if you're gonna do some weird button-pushing thing, it's not worth it, steer clear, keep this product off your platform, easy. Is a piece of software really only of v…
> Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed?
It's not even open source in the first place if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is disallowed, as that would be discriminating on use case. It ultimately doesn't matter much to the open source community, as it effectively can't be used in otherwise open source projects, as the result wouldn't be open source and it is going to be license-incompatible with many projects anyways.
That said, I find it preposterous to accept this notion even ignoring that point. You shouldn't have to take it on faith that what you're doing is allowed by the copyright license—the whole point of the license is to make that clear. Everybody always shrugs off the risk of a malicious owner until Oracle acquires their dependencies.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#17People want to call their software open source, because it attracts customers. They don’t believe in software freedoms or open source, otherwise they’d never try or want to restrict Freedom 0. If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.
Why do people feel entitled to profitting off the work of others?
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#18I know I am tooting Sentry's own horn a bit here, and since I was involved it is close to my heart. We struggled at one point with how to build a large company on top of an open source project, and we never liked the idea of simply carving out parts of the codebase and marking them as closed source (open core). At the same time, there was always the latent risk that even if you put 95% of the energy into the product,…
Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this? I haven’t checked in years but that always seemed like the real competitive blocker?
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#19People want to call their software open source, because it attracts customers. They don’t believe in software freedoms or open source, otherwise they’d never try or want to restrict Freedom 0. If your SaaS can’t compete on the service part, the software part ain’t gonna make or break you.
Why do people feel entitled to profitting off the work of others?
It's not entitlement, it's the entire purpose of OSS. You are free to modify, distribute, and profit from other people's code. If you can't do any of these things, then the project is NOT OSS. Simple as that.
Entitlement is when you expect that OSS contributors must provide you with a warranty or a certain feature you need for your business activity. They are not.
Re: O'saasy License Agreement
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, when people worry about "stealing" their FOSS work, they don't mean someone forking their project, they mean someone outcompeting them on offering commercial infrastructure for their own project, typically launching a competing SaaS service. Of course, this is explicitly permitted and even encouraged by FOSS licenses, so calling it "stealing" is quite absurd. But it is also a real problem for a company tr…
> Essentially, it's pretty clear that you can't make a successful company out of selling free software If that is so the case, what about source available licenses similar to O'saasy. Do they work? Because personally, although I love foss, its a compromise and I am willing to make it for some of my projects if it means that I can get enough funding to work on it full time basically.
I don't think we know yet if these work, at least for more than 5-10 years. Mongo and Elastic are still kicking, so perhaps they do. But it's very unclear if they would have gotten where they are had they started with the current licenses.